President Obama wants to stake his legacy on fighting global warming even if he has to fake it, which he does.

That inconvenient truth will get a hearing Thursday by the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and it won't be pretty. The Subcommittee on Energy and Power, led by Rep. Ed Whitfield, R-Ky., will convene the “Standing up for Jobs and Affordable Energy” hearing, an appropriate nickname for the expected slice-and-dice of “EPA's Proposed Carbon Dioxide Regulations for power plants.”

In early June President Obama's heavy-handed Environmental Protection Agency unveiled a radical plan to destroy existing U.S. coal-fired power plants by imposing a deliberately impossible carbon dioxide emission limit -- reduction of 30 percent by 2030.

Upon examination, the rule offers no real benefit to anyone — beyond EPA’s armed enforcers — and costs to everyone, which prompted the subcommittee hearing.

Whitfield set the hearing’s tone in a news release: “Under the guise of regulating power plants, President Obama’s agency is seeking to expand its regulatory reach over the entire electricity sector.

“Committee members are concerned over EPA’s unprecedented reach, and the potential of this plan to increase electricity prices, eliminate U.S. jobs, and threaten grid reliability, with no meaningful effect on future climate patterns.”

The panel will examine only one witness: Janet McCabe, the Environmental Protection Agency’s assistant administrator for the Office of Air and Radiation.

Whitfield is deeply committed to oversight of this rule. In an email exchange, he told me, “This is a very important hearing, as it will be the first time President Obama's radical EPA comes to the Hill to defend the agency's latest proposed rule designed to shut-down coal-fired power plants -- a rule the administration is pushing through without Congress' direction or approval, despite its potential to completely disrupt our energy sector and cripple our economy.”

I asked about some of the highly controversial legal and policy issues surrounding this proposal. Whitfield said, “We have questions for Ms. McCabe about her agency’s authority and overreach in writing this proposed rule and how EPA’s actions will impact Americans and their jobs and pocketbooks."

The record of EPA's testimony before Congress invites cynicism, for it is without honor or conscience, not to mention the absence of facts. McCabe, as did her predecessor Gina McCarthy - now EPA boss - will predictably deflect tough questions because the truth would outrage most Americans and deny Obama his nightmare legacy. We can expect mischaracterization, obfuscation and flat-out lies.

Whitfield appears unlikely to put up with that. He said, “As I have promised repeatedly, Obama’s assault on affordable electricity will not go unchecked.”

McCabe faces a tough sell with this proposed rule: Everything EPA has said about its benefits has been ignominiously debunked, some from unlikely quarters. For example, the EPA's claim that the rule will create $30 billion in climate benefits by 2030 has been deflated by the liberal Brookings Institution.

In their report, “Determining the Proper Scope of Climate Change Benefits,” Brookings fellow Ted Gayer and Vanderbilt University economist Kip Viscusi revealed that the EPA cleverly selected an “apples and oranges” methodology that overstates the benefits so the regulation looks more attractive.
The "apples" are $30 billion in benefits worldwide and the "oranges" are the American taxpayers who pay the whole world’s bill.

It's something like asking New York City to pay the water bill for every toilet flush in China - and pleading America's public health and welfare to convince New Yorkers to pay up.

We can thank the Obama administration's shameful Interagency Working Group on Social Cost of Carbon for developing those "worldwide guidelines" in 2010 to deliberately swindle the American people. Even Democratic President Bill Clinton wouldn't allow that, issuing Executive Order 12866 in 1993 requiring regulations to benefit the U.S. citizenry only, not the world.

To see through Obama’s slimy stratagem, the Brookings scholars did an “apples and apples” comparison on his proposed anti-coal rule, and found the domestic benefit amount is only about $2.1 billion at the lowest, ranging up to an optimistic $6.9 billion at the top. But the estimated compliance cost is $7.3 billion.

Get it? In the best of all possible Obama worlds, American taxpayers are down nearly half a billion bucks and missing 40 percent of their electricity.

The Brookings report concluded that estimated climate benefits are “largely conjecture and certainly overstated.” And we’re expecting McCabe to tell the truth about that under oath?

I hope Whitfield gets around to asking McCabe about how much the once-respected-but-now-turned-shill American Lung Association loves the EPA. The ALA ought to love the Obama administration a lot: ALA's 591 federal grants amount to $43,016,875, according to USASpending.gov. As a cogent post on JunkScience.com said, “EPA owns the American Lung Association.”

But not entirely: Big Green foundations own a substantial chunk too: The Foundation Search database posts 2,806 grants to ALA totaling more than $76 million, with millions coming from Environmental Grantmakers Association members, tagged with purpose statements like pushing EPA to hit coal-fired power plants, do media advocacy and grassroots organizing.

Come to the American Lung Association for all your propaganda needs.

Thursday's McCabe testimony comes on the heels of collapsed U.N. negotiations to repair failing global carbon markets, the International Monetary Fund's slashed forecast of U.S. economic growth to a shocking 2 percent, and the headline-grabbing opposition of Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Australian leader Tony Abbott to "climate measures that would destroy their economies,” which our Climate Cultist in Chief Obama seems insanely eager to embrace.

Memo to McCabe: the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

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Dennis T. Averyhas been quoted in publications ranging from Time and The Washington Post to The Farm Journal. His article, “What's Wrong with Global Warming?” was published in the August 1999 issue of Reader's Digest. With S. Fred Singer, Avery is the coauthor of Unstoppable Global Warming; Every 1500 Years. He travels the world as a speaker, has testified before Congress, and has appeared on most of the nation's major television networks, including a program discussing the bacterial dangers of organic foods on ABC's 20/20. Avery studied agricultural economics at Michigan State University and the University of Wisconsin. He holds awards for outstanding performance from three different government agencies and was awarded the National Intelligence Medal of Achievement in 1983. In addition to lending his expertise to CARE as a member of the Energy Counsel, Dennis Avery currently serves as Director, Center for Global Food Issues and is a Senior Fellow for the Hudson Institute is a non-partisan policy research organization dedicated to innovative research and analysis that promotes global security, prosperity, and freedom.

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Robert L. Bradley, Jr. is one of the nation’s leading experts on the history and regulation of energy and related sustainable development issues. He has presented professional testimony on energy issues to the California Energy Commission and United States Senate; his opinion-page editorials on energy policy have appeared in the New York Times and many other newspapers across the country; his energy views have been aired on National Public Radio, Voice of America, CBS Radio Network, and Armed Forces Radio, as well as local programs. Bradley is a multi-published author whose most widely read book is Energy: the Master Resource (with Richard Fulmer). His newest is Capitalism at Work: Business, Government and Energy. He holds a B.A. in economics, a masters in economics from the University of Houston, and a Ph.D. in political economy from International College. Bradley is a member of the International Association for Energy Economics, the American Economics Association, and the American Historical Association. He is CEO and founder of the Institute for Energy Research in Houston; visiting fellow of the Institute of Economic Affairs in London; an adjunct scholar of the Cato Institute; and a member of the academic review committee of the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University.

Paul Driessen’scareer has included staff tenures with the United States Senate, Department of the Interior and an energy trade association. He has spoken and written frequently on energy and environmental policy, global climate change, corporate social responsibility, and on marine life associated with oil platforms off the coasts of California and Louisiana. Driessen received his BA in geology and field ecology from Lawrence University, JD from the University of Denver College of Law, and accreditation in public relations from the Public Relations Society of America. A former member of the Sierra Club and Zero Population Growth, he abandoned their cause when he recognized that the environmental movement had become intolerant in its views, inflexible in its demands, unwilling to recognize our tremendous strides in protecting the environment, and insensitive to the needs of billions of people who lack the food, electricity, safe water, healthcare and other basic necessities that we take for granted. Driessen is a senior fellow with the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow and Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, nonprofit public policy institutes that focus on energy, the environment, economic development and international affairs.

Michael J. Economidesis among America's leading energy analysts who regularly appears on national TV and radio programs. As a consultant, educator, and PhD petroleum engineer, Economides has done technical and managerial work in more than 70 countries. A professor at the Cullen College of Engineering, University of Houston, Economides has written or co-written about 200 articles and peer-reviewed papers and 11 textbooks. Economides is the Editor-in-Chief for the Energy Tribunemagazine. He is also the co-author, with Ron Oligney, of the industry primer, The Color of Oil: The History, the Money and the Politics of the World's Biggest Business, which was published in 2000 and has since been translated into five languages. CARE is honored to include Michael Economides as a member of the Energy Counsel.

Michael R. Fox, Ph.D., is a retired nuclear scientist and university chemistry professor. He is the science and energy writer/reporter for the HawaiiReport.com. A resident of Kaneohe, Hawaii, he has nearly 40 years experience in the energy field. His interests and activities in the communications of science, energy, and the environment has led to several communications awards, hundreds of speeches, and many appearances on television and talk shows. Dr. Fox is listed by the Heartland Institute as a global warming/climate change expert. He is also the Senior Fellow for Science at the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii. He can be reached via email at mfox@grassrootinstitute.org. Please visit Dr. Mike Fox's blog at http://www.foxreport.org/.

Byron King is the resident energy and natural resource expert at Agora Financial, LLC. A geologist by training, he worked for the former Gulf Oil Company and has followed oil industry developments for over 30 years. Byron’s career path also took him into the U.S. Navy, both active duty and reserve. In the 1990s and 2000s Byron engaged in a vigorous private law practice. For the past five years Byron has been writing about energy and natural resource issues for an international audience. Currently, Byron writes and edits two major publications, Outstanding Investments and Energy and Scarcity Investor. Byron holds degrees from Harvard, the U.S. Naval War College and the University of Pittsburgh.

Tom Tanton is the Principal of T2 & Associates, a firm providing consulting services to the energy and technology industries. Mr. Tanton has over 35 years experience in the energy, economy, and environmental fields.